Migrating to Day One has resurrected my efforts to scan and transcribe my older paper journals. As I’ve been doing this, I’ve run into the need for a couple small shell scripts to automate things.

On several of these journals I’m scanning the full two-page spread because the whole journal fits on the scanner platen, which means splitting the resulting image out into two (one for each page). Splitimage uses ImageMagick to do that nicely. There’s some overlap, but for a fully automated solution it’s not bad, and it saves me a lot of time cropping.

I prefer taking these split images and renaming them sequentially using something more meaningful (“journal-2009.005.jpg” rather than “IMG_0034.JPG”, for example). I used to do this with OS X’s Automator tool, and it works quite well, but I wanted a quick command-line tool to speed things up. Enter dub, a zsh script that simplifies the batch renaming process. Now I can just type:

dub journal-2009.X.jpg *.JPG

And then it’s just a matter of dumping them into Unbindery and transcribing them.